After physical conflict erupted between police and
protesters during demonstrations at UC Berkeley and UC Davis in November 2011,
University President Mark G. Yudof asked Vice President and General Counsel Charles
F. Robinson and Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher F. Edley, Jr. to review
existing policies and practices regarding the University’s response to
demonstrations and civil disobedience.
This review was not intended as a fact-finding investigation into the
November 2011 protests, or into any other particular incident.
Other reviews have been tasked with that objective. Rather, this review was aimed at identifying
best practices to inform the University’s response to future
demonstrations. Since work on the
review—and this resulting Report—began, additional clashes on other campuses
have underscored the need for this analysis.
This Report is premised on the belief that free expression,
robust discourse, and vigorous debate over ideas and principles are essential
to the mission of our University. The
goal of this Report is to identify practices that will facilitate such expression
and encourage lawful protest activity—while also protecting the health and
safety of our students, faculty, staff, police, and the general public when
protesters choose to violate laws and regulations.
It is important to note that several of these practices have
already been adopted by campuses within our system. Indeed, many of our campuses have long
employed these recommended practices to positive effect in responding to
protests—the vast majority of which are handled successfully by campuses across
the UC system, without conflict. By
recommending these practices in this Report, we do not mean to suggest that
they are novel or have never previously been employed within our system. For some campus administrators and police,
however, implementing our recommendations will require a substantial shift away
from a mindset that has been focused primarily on the maintenance of order and
adherence to rules and regulations. With
this Report, we mean to encourage all our campus administrations and police to
consistently implement the best practices recommended herein. In addition, for some protesters,
implementing our recommendations will require taking more responsibility for
their activities, including by educating themselves about protest-related rules
and considering the impact acts of civil disobedience can have on others in the
campus community.
In developing this prospective framework for responding to
protests and civil disobedience, the authors examined existing University
policies and practices on speech, demonstrations, and use of force by police;
the opinions of students, faculty, administrators, staff, and police on all ten
campuses; and the views of academics and other experts on speech, civil
liberties, and law enforcement. The objective
has been to be as broad and fair as possible in collecting information in order
to develop a thoughtful and fact-based Report.
Ultimately, the Report arrives at 49 recommendations in nine
areas:
1. Civil Disobedience Challenges. The Report points out the need for the
University to define and communicate more clearly the free speech rights and
responsibilities of all members of the University community. We must ensure that there is no confusion on
our campuses about the rights of individuals to express themselves and to
assemble lawfully for that purpose. But
the more challenging situations arise when protesters decide to violate laws or
regulations—in other words, to engage in civil disobedience.
The University and individual campuses should amend their
policies in order to recognize explicitly the historic role of civil
disobedience as a protest tactic. Those
policies should also make clear, however, that civil disobedience by definition
involves violating laws or regulations, and that civil disobedience will generally
have consequences for those engaging in it because of the impact it can have on
the rest of the campus community.
2. Relationship Building.
The University must endeavor to increase trust and understanding among campus
stakeholders, by better utilizing existing communication channels and by
building new ones. Many protests can be
avoided if there are effective lines of communication between would-be
protesters and administrative officials, and opportunities to raise substantive
concerns with the Administration and to obtain a meaningful response. The University’s response to protests can
also be handled better and more efficiently by maintaining strong working
relationships between police officials and administrators and relationships of
trust between campus police and the communities they serve.
3. Role Definition and Coordination. To ensure an effective University response to
protests involving civil disobedience, there must be an established system for
coordination between police and administrators, with well-defined roles and a
shared understanding that ultimate responsibility for the campus’s response rests
with the Chancellor. The Chancellor and
other administrators should develop and follow a set of guidelines designed to
minimize a police response to protests, and to limit the use of force against protesters
wherever possible. Absent exigent
circumstances, the Chancellor or the Chancellor’s designee must approve any
force by police immediately before it is used.
And greater emphasis must be placed on coordinating with outside law
enforcement agencies who may provide assistance during large demonstrations.
4. Hiring and Training.
The Report advances recommendations regarding hiring police officers and
better training them about how to respond to civil disobedience. It also recommends that University administrators
be required to attend regular trainings, in order to educate them about
approaches for de-escalating protest situations, and to help them better
understand police policies and practices.
5. Communications with Protesters. With strong communications between
demonstrators and the campus Administration, civil disobedience can sometimes
be avoided—or, at least, can take place peacefully without any use of force by
police. The Report offers
recommendations regarding communication and coordination with protesters in
advance of a planned event, as well as during an ongoing demonstration.
6. Response During Events.
Once a protest is underway and individual protesters begin to engage in
civil disobedience, the decisions made by administrators can directly affect
whether the protest ends peacefully rather than with violence. The Report recommends several strategies for
reaching a peaceful accord with protesters without resorting to the use of
force by police. It also proposes
adoption of policies to guide our campus police departments if the
Administration decides that a police response to the protest is necessary, such
as a systemwide response option framework with guidance on appropriate
responses to different types of resistance.
7. Documenting Activity During Demonstrations. The Report recommends several parallel
methods for creating an accurate record of the actions of police and
demonstrators during demonstrations.
These include the use of neutral observers, a policy of videotaping
activity at the demonstration, and the creation of police after-action reports
following any police response to a demonstration.
8. Post-Event Review.
The Report recommends that the University adopt a systemwide structure located
outside of the police department and the campus Administration for reviewing
the response to civil disobedience.
9. Implementation.
Finally, we suggest a process for implementing the recommendations in
this Report. Most significantly, it
recommends that the President require each Chancellor to take concrete action
to implement our recommendations, and to report promptly to the President on
his or her progress.
The recommendations were posted in draft form so they could
be commented on and debated. After considering
the public comments and making some revisions in response to them, we have
finalized the recommendations and now submit them to the President. To be sure, no single report can resolve all
the issues the University faces regarding protest and civil disobedience. Successfully laying the groundwork for safe
and accountable protest activity will take the commitment and effort of all
members of the University community.
This Report is just the starting point—an attempt to assist the
University in moving forward to celebrate the diversity of opinion and culture
on our campuses, to do so with respect and civility, and to build on the
illustrious history of public involvement and free speech that is the DNA of
the University of California.
Preliminary Statement on Scope
We begin with a couple notes on the scope of this
Report. First, we have found that the
most difficult questions concerning how our University should respond to
protests center around a narrow band of protest activity involving violations
of laws or campus regulations, which we will refer to as civil
disobedience. The issues presented by
other protest conduct are more straightforward.
Protests that are lawful and comply with the applicable time, place, and
manner restrictions are clearly permissible, and our Administrations and police
departments must allow them to proceed—if not encourage them. On the other end of the spectrum, violent activity
by protesters, which threatens the safety of others or significantly damages
property, is illegal and cannot be permitted.
The thorniest questions lie between these two extremes. How should our University respond to protest
activity that is not violent, but that violates the law or campus regulations
and that may negatively impact the University’s mission? This form of protest activity, which we refer
to throughout this Report as “civil disobedience,” is the central focus of our
Report.
Second, although we recognize the troubling possibility that
protests may involve some individuals bent on creating mischief, destroying
property, or worse, handling such protesters has not been a primary focus of
this Report. It has been our experience
that the vast majority of protests are peaceful, and that the vast majority of protesters
see protest as a means of expressing their views and opinions in a peaceful
manner. Most of our recommendations for
responding to protests are therefore premised on the assumption that protesters
will be acting in good faith and in a peaceful manner, even if violating laws
or regulations to emphasize their message.
But we cannot ignore the possibility that some individuals may have less
honorable intentions, and may seize on protests as an opportunity merely to
cause disruption or damage. We think our campuses should attempt to follow our
recommendations regardless of the apparent motivation of the protesters, but to
the extent ill-intentioned individuals are among the protesters, we recognize
that it may complicate the efforts of our Administrations and police
departments to successfully respond, and may render some of the Recommendations
in our Report infeasible or ineffective.
Full report at:
1 comment:
See our critique of the Robinson-Edley report here: http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/protest-policing-and-uc-regents.html
The objective [of the report] is to transform struggles over privatization into a sort of choreographed dance between students and police, to minimize or obscure the work of the administration, and to avoid at all cost any disturbance of the material operations of the university.
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